Advertise? Cost per patron

[drfrightner]

Here is the deal marketing is really tough... if you live in a town like New York City or LA or lets say Chicago you will spend a lot more money to make a dent than if you are located in Springfield Missouri or even lets say Tulsa Oklahoma. You also might be charging more to get into your haunts like some haunts in Philly area might be getting 30 bucks, but they might also be spending $4 or $5 per person on marketing.

Now you say you are in a very small town... yes marketing is going to be cheaper overall but that doesn't mean you should spend as little as you just pointed out. It should be easy to reach 100% market awareness and you should shoot for that... in small towns like that there isn't much else to do so why not go for every last person in the area.

Fact is a lot of haunt owners don't know how to run a business, but they know everything about making an animation, or painting a scene, while some haunters no everything about marketing but nothing about scaring people. Its all over the board really... the haunts that understand marketing, scaring people, detailing their haunt, haunts who invest like Nehterworld do the big numbers, those who run their haunt likes its in a small market don't. Look at 13th Gate this guy is in a small small small city and he's doing 50 plus. So it can be done but you have to be willing to invest...

The best places to spend your money are the following: YOUR WEBSITE - YOUR URL - YOUR LOGOS - PROFESSIONAL PHOTOS - PROFESSIONAL VIDEOS ... wrapping a hearse has no candle to the before mentioned none. You are trying to sell how cool your event is however your photos suck, your videos suck, your logos suck, your website sucks so guess what your business will suck and this might be despite the fact that you have a GREAT HAUNT!

All the marketing you do from radio, to web marketing, to yes wrapping your hearse all goes to promote those AWESOME VIDEOS, AWESOME PHOTOS, AWESOME LOGOS and your OVERALL AWESOME presentation on your website.

This all takes money... money most of you are not willing to invest however you'll invest $10,000 into ONE prop... this is nuts. Look just my opinion even though this opinion is a fact I guess that makes this an opinion of fact. LOL

I don't care how small or how big your town is make sure those things are done and done right and you have something huge to build on well into the future.

Larry

[Greg Chrise]

I'm going to just decide Larry is a success and what he says is where you want to end up. It is very easy to get clouded because you see your haunt every once in a while and don't communicate to the rest of the world if it is awesome or not. If a web site looks like it is gif art from 1990, I hear people complain that who cares that the web site only attracts 2% of the market so again who cares.

Yet right down the highway, one with awesome videos, photos, websites and logos and well chosen URLs are seeing twice the numbers when the haunts are actually comperable. Yet there is an over all vibe of success and they literally double the attendance of the more lame one. A 4800 customer haunt has a crappy web site and a 11,000 customer haunt has a wonderful web presence. Same customers in different identical kinds of towns, in fact the 11,000customer haunt is in a town where it is more affluent and getting people to leave their big screen TVs is more of a problem and just doesn't happen. 50 miles apart, same populations.

Yet neither one could handle 50,000 cars per season. One parks in a horse field and closes if there is the slightest rain and the other is most likely at capacity with parking in the ghetto on those last few nights of the season. So I have seen this actually happen in real numbers. Actually more than double is possibly the difference in good marketing.

Still, it is tough to spend $3 when you only have $1 and at some point a few years after start up, you have enough haunt that you have to stop spending money and time on and sell, changing your buying spending habits as you actually get some cash flow and not always doing the same thing, focusing on the same skills.

What I have ommitted or overlooked is how that extra $2 can be saved if you actually become the media professional because in a way that is what we do as promoters. Or we are basically getting paid on the back end because I want $2 a ticket and will go as far as providing all the walls and costumes and let it run. There are a number of ways just like building walls with the help of friends to achieve this $3 marketing value as friends also do web sites and need one to show off for a profile, friends do logos, freinds do copywriting, freinds do independent films and want to experiment and see things play out successfully as a trial.

The only difference is the higher population zones can't possibly individually promote the 100 things it takes to do in a timely fashion or afford to do it over a period of time of growth and pay the rent, so they have to pay and hope proffesionals can pull it off. Having all the skills and the proper mind set is rare. You can't expect some happy people in a print shop to all of a sudden get all spooky and provide anything but happy pumpkins. So this whole forum thing is people that have the skills and the mind set.

And apparently props do sell way before their time at $10,000 and the prop guys have great web sites but no one esle gets paid in the whole industry unless they are the bank or the landlord or organize a tradeshow.

[Greg Chrise]

So yeah, if you want 10,000 people, send me a check for $30,000, $3 per customer. I will call some people and really only spend $7500 and make $22,500 and live all year long on a stay-cation. I'll be waiting for your check, let you know I'm going to the mail box every day now. You can even make payments! $10,000 down and $1875 per month will get it, don't be late on your payment or your web site goes down.

[Greg Chrise]

I'm counting on you all sending checks, to really fit in with the promoter crowd I'm going to have to stay indoors all the time and gain at least another 150 pounds, my goal is to double my life long weight and see if I can still walk. I have to get away from that working outdoors in the sun look and get all grey and pasty looking. See ya at Transworld! Burp!

[Greg Chrise]

Even though I'm being silly, I could see right now producing your commercial for about $1500 and getting the web site and logos done for about $4,000. So we are at $6500 and all I have done is made a few phone calls or emails. I can send you some signature characters, a kiosk display recycled from last year, Only see your haunt from facebook pictures and be too lazy to drive 50 miles. Call the radio stations and spend $1000 each for 3, I'm there at $9500 and I guess we need some fliers for $500. That puts me at $10,000. So if I did my own logos or had my Mexican based guy do it for $100 and had the website crafted in India for $4 an hour, I could pull it all off for about $1000. On account I'm an artist and can just draw up original stuff but the kid in Mexico is the bomb even compared to me and works all digital and shit.

So I'm back down to $7,000. Lordy Lordy what should I spend more money on. I just don't know. How about if I just go into town and start handing out money and cigarettes? Then when halloween rolls around, I'll call everyone from the front seat of my hearse with my pay as you go phone and say "Hey man, remember that $5 I loaned you? It's payback time. You have to come buy a ticket now or you can do it on line". " With intrest it is now $20 and you better bring some people too or I will talk bad about you. Maybe I do have those pictures I sort of mentioned."

Oh, yeah and get on my same phone service so the next call doesn't cost me 10 cents.

[BrotherMysterio]

I'm counting on you all sending checks, to really fit in with the promoter crowd I'm going to have to stay indoors all the time and gain at least another 150 pounds, my goal is to double my life long weight and see if I can still walk. I have to get away from that working outdoors in the sun look and get all grey and pasty looking. See ya at Transworld! Burp!

Your check is in the mail.

C.

[drfrightner]

Just FYI... I have been working DAY and NIGHT over the last two days to update my website. That is just how important all this is... I'm having graphics made, making upgrades you name it. I have new videos coming on every attractions, I'm having other logos turned into CGI FX, blah, blah. Well I'm heading off to bed finally... worked all day since about 10am until now yes about 3am updating www.scarefest.com

Its almost done about 85% there right now.

Well I can barely keep my eyes open so off to bed however this is the type of money, time and energy you MUST put into your website.
Larry

[Zombie Apocalypse]

Greg you are now and always will be the man !!! keep up the good fight !!

[Jim Warfield]

Order Of Events,,,,/....?

A brand new graduate with a degree in "promotion" offered to pen a letter telling everyone how wonderfull my Haunt was, for nothing.
Sure , go for it and Thanks.
She later told me about all the numerous "Press Releaes" she had sent to "Everybody!" Every newspaper, radio station, school...
I got one call from a High School kid who had his own little radio show from his school, which was a zero.
I began getting people from 35 miles south of here all because of a mysterious "Doctor" who loved my place and was a walking-talking ad service (A big fan!)
A conserge from a popular resort 40 miles away loved my place and said if I could get 1,000 really nice flyers printed,that she would make sure EVERYONE who came to the resort left with one of those flyers in-hand! I did not have that kind of money, I asked a Chamber of Commerce officer (Shaker & Mover there) if they could financially help me to get these flyers?
No they could not. (I had a spy or two within their club and knew that some of them were very much against me having my haunt but this didnot stop one of them from insisting that I must join their club a few years later after I became an "overnight Sensation" and small-town "Hero", Nationally and internationally known (the only such critter in this county) He said I must join because "They Had Done So Much To Help Me!" No they had not.
Then I crafted a letter that got put in the Chicago Tribune Halloween section which brought huge crowds to my little haunt in this village of a "Town".
Then "Wild Chicago" decided that after many years of So Many people writing them, telling them to come see my house, and the producer accumulating so many photos from those fans of the house, that they should come.
They would ask their audience to vote which shows /segments they wanted re-broadcast? They re-showed my segment about 35 times in the next three years. Yes, this helped! People could see the fun we were all having when they were filming here.
Deciding to be a full-timer haunting allowed me so many opportunitys that I would have missed if I had been punching someone else;s timeclock, so grew the business.
The Nationa Geographic World came and put me (the house) on their October cover, a national magazine for kids that saw 3.5 Million copies sold. Their company policy had just changed allowing "Spooky" stuff into their pages, I was right there to answer their call when it happened to ring.
The Chicago Tribune sent a very talented feature writer who stayed in town for three days to write about my odd house and peculair talents at making something from nothing. He even interviewed my Mother without my knowlege!
His story was lengthy and well recieved and read nationally. People all over the USA knew about little Ravens Grin Inn. The Florida issues had full-color pictures of the house.
Then "Extreme Homes" on the HGTV network came here because we do live in this house (A prerequisite of their show) That episode was shown and re-shown all over the USA and Europe for the next many years. Recently a former employee of the local Blackwater shooting range had some phone calls from Europe asking about my house. The HGTV show was dubbed in French, broadcast from an Arts & Entertainment channel in Germany into France where a Mount Carroll native living in Paris saw it. (I wish I had a copy of that, ME speaking French!)
Along the way , most of the Haunt Magazines did stories about my house too.
I have only had a computer for about 13 years. The first time I looked at a computer, in the local library I searched "Jim Warfield" and was made privy to conversations those in the haunt business had had about ME!?
I remember the funniest conversation asked :"Does anybody in the haunt business know how to impart the real fear of physical harm to a customer without using a chainsaw?"
The answer that day from a few haunters was "Yes, This guy in Mount Carroll knows how to do that!"
For the first several years I had my house I didn't even know that anybody was still doing haunts excpet, of course for Disney, I was just doing things that I thought would "work" to scare and entertain the customers.
Now for the last several years , the old media have dried up and sometimes died (or come very close to it!)
We have had major-market Tv appearances generate no response that we could measure. Major newspapers are dinosaurs and worthless (Sad) There are way too many channels on cable.satellite to guess where to spend even that dollar. I tried that , caller I.D. and advance reservations and asking customers that October showed about 10 customers from spending $1,100 and the ad looked very good.
The local State Funded Tourism office began an Oct. program, promoting haunts, pumpkin patches and any, everything else because of my house's success.
Their brochures and website seemed to work very well and cheaply too for maybe 5 years...
I have always tried to give more than a fair amount of time and effort to entertain my customers. I feel that I have favorably impressed enough over the last 25 years that I have a real fan base.
I also feel and think that of 100 haunt wanna-be owners that maybe 10 of them wil have the experiences and skill and ambition to work and struggle the hours that I have (and still do) to make it "work".
Maybe some of my patrons might think that I am fibbing when I tell them that I have done probably 95% of ALL the work here during the last 25 years, but I am not, it is the truth.
Most of us have to make our own "luck", if I was smarter or had more than $1.98 when I started, maybe I would not have had to put in such long, long hours, but then I do enjoy "work"........
I had worked for 15 of my "adult" years for my Father in the Plumbing and heating field (long hours little pay) and from the time I was maybe five years old, everyone kept telling me that I was "Artisitic" or that I just had many strange thoughts...(too many for most)